Asylum For Blood-Feuds-Affected Person -- Lawyer Recommandation

The Internationale is the international song of both Marxist and non-Marxist socialist parties. It was written in French by Eugene Pottier, a wood-worker from Lille, after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, and set to music by P. Degeyter.

The "Internationale" referred to is the International Working Men's Association, the so-called First International (1864­76), part of which had supported the Commune. It has been used across the world as a song of resistence to oppression. Perhaps its most dramatic use in recent years was its repeated singing by the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - although, curiously, the western press did not comment on this.

Off-hand I can think of 5 species of highly intelligent and social matriarchal animals: Elephants, Sperm Whales, Lions, Hyenas, and one species of Baboon.

It appears that matriarchy is a form of society in which power is with the women and especially with the mothers of a community. Matriarchy is distinct from matrilineality, where children are identified in terms of their mother rather than their father, and extended families and tribal alliances form along female blood-lines. For instance, in Jewish Halakhic tradition only a person born of a Jewish mother is automatically considered Jewish. Hence Jewish descent is passed on from the mother to the child.

Matriarchy is also distinct from matrilocality, which some anthropologists use to describe societies where maternal authority is prominent in domestic relations, owing to the husband joining the wife's family, rather than the wife moving to the husband's village or tribe, such that she is supported by her extended family, and husbands tend to be more socially isolated.

Matriarchy is a combination of these factors; it includes matrilineality and matrilocality. But what is most important is the fact that women are in charge for the distribution of goods for the clan and, especially, the sources of nourishment, fields and food. This characteristic feature sees every clan member dependent beyond matrilineality and matrilocality and grants women such a strong position that these societies are now considered matriarchal.

The unclear concept of matriarchy, and of its replacement by "patriarchy" can be linked to the historical "inevitabilities" which the nineteenth century's concept of progress through cultural evolution introduced into anthropology. Friedrich Engels, among others, formed the notion that some primitive peoples did not grasp the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. They therefore had no clear notion of paternity, according to this hypothesis; women produced children mysteriously, without necessary links to the man or men they had sex with. When men discovered paternity, according to the hypothesis, they acted to claim power to monopolize women and claim children as their own offspring. The move from primitive matriarchy to patriarchy was a step forward for human knowledge.

This belief system was the result of errors in early ethnography, which in return was the result of unsophisticated methods of field work. When strangers arrive and start asking where babies come from, the urge to respond imaginatively is hard to resist, as Margaret Mead discovered in Samoa. In fact, while prior to the discovery of egg cells and genetics there have been many different explanations of the mechanics of pregnancy and the relative contributions of either sex, no human group, however primitive, is unaware of the link between intercourse and pregnancy. The fact that each child has one unique father has come more recently, however; Greek and Roman writers thought that the seed of two men might both contribute to the character of the child. By the time these mistakes were corrected in anthropology, however, the idea that a matriarchy had once existed had been picked up on in comparative religion and archaeology, and was used as the basis of new hypotheses that were unrelated to the postulated ignorance of primitive people about paternity.

One of the most persistent claims of feminist historians who concentrate in ancient and pre-historic societies has been the rebuttal of a possibility to a matriarchal society anytime in the distant past. It seems to be a way for them to legitimize their feminist research by distancing themselves from such outrageous extremities. On the other hand, several popular writers, like Riane Eisler, have energetically promoted ideas of an ancient Great Goddess, and the matriarchal society which worshipped her. Some archaeologists, like Marija Gimbutas and Lucy Goodison, have also contributed to the science of old goddesses by digging up and interpreting prehistoric finds from a new perspective.

It is unfortunate that the discussion of a possibility for female dominance in prehistoric or early historic societies has to be so strongly ideologically colored. First of all, there is no reason for even ardent feminists to take either positive or negative view into the question on ideological reasons. The oppression of women in many present-day societies remains the same even if patriarchy is proved universal, thus the need for improvement in women's status is as urgent were there any matriarchal societies in the past or not. Maybe anti-feminists feel like gaining ideological ground if it is proved that males have always been dominant. On that ground it could be seen as a biological necessity, but the logic is so weak that I wish to steer away from such argumentation.

Hey rolodex, the Paris commune is one of the greatest events in human history. France had been defeated by the armies of Germany which stood at Versailles, a few miles away from Paris. The leaders of French capitalism, statesmen, and soldier, were on their knees before the German conquerors, anxious to save their hides and the plunder that they had accumulated during the war. They were ready to sell out France to the conquered. The French people had proclaimed the French republic, and these capitalist politicians knew that one great obstacle stood in the way of their conspiracy with Bismarck. This obstacle was the armed republicans of Paris. Working in the closest association with the German invader, the French ruling class attempted to disarm the Parisians but the workers of Paris, emaciated by a five month's famine, did not hesitate for a single moment. They seized the power in Paris and established the Paris Commune. What exactly was this Commune? There have been many interpretations. The interpretation of Karl Marx remains unchallenged in its simplicity and its penetration. "It was essentially a working class government, the product of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of man."

The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage. None of its functionaries was paid more than the wages of a skilled worker. It did not expropriate the property of the bourgeoisie, but it handed to associations of workingmen all closed workshops and factories, whether the capitalist owners had run away or simply had decided to stop work. It lasted for 71 days. It was destroyed by a combination of its own weaknesses, chiefly a lack of decision, and the treacheries of the French bourgeoisie in shameless alliance with the German army. The murderous brutality with which the fighters of the Commune were shot, tortured, and deported, remained a landmark in European civilization, until the days of Hitler and Stalin.

Today, to the American proletariat, there are many lessons to be drawn for the history of the Commune. Perhaps the most important for the advanced workers are the methods by which Marx approached its study and conclusions which he drew. For him, the Commune, despite its failure, was a symbol of inestimable value. It was a symbol in that it showed the real women of Paris -- heroic, noble, and devoted like the women of antiquity. It was a symbol in that it showed to the world: "working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris -- almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates -- radiant in the enthusiasm of its historical initiative." It was a symbol in that it admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for the immortal cause. It was a symbol because even before peace had been signed with Germany, the Commune made a German working man the Minister of Labor. It was a symbol because under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on the one hand, and the Bonapartist army on the other, it pulled down the great Vendome column which stood as a monument to the martial glory of the first Napoleon. Marx saw in these actions not accidental gestures but organic responses of the revolutionary proletariat to the barbarous practices and ideology of bourgeois society.

The capitalist army, the capitalist state, the capitalist bureaucracy, cannot be seized by the revolutionary proletariat and used for its own purposes. It had to be smashed completely and a new state organized, based upon the organization of the working class. In 1905, and later in 1917, the Russian working class, by the formation of Soviets, or workers councils, laid the basis of a new type of social organization. It was by his studies of Marx's analysis of the Commune that Lenin able to recognize so quickly the significance of the Soviets and to establish them as the basis of the new workers' state. Today the advanced American worker needs to know the history of the international struggles of the proletariat. From these he will most quickly learn to understand his own.

The capitalist army, the capitalist state, the capitalist bureaucracy, cannot be seized by the revolutionary proletariat and used for its own purposes. It had to be smashed completely and a new state organized, based upon the organization of the working class. In 1905, and later in 1917, the Russian working class, by the formation of Soviets, or workers councils, laid the basis of a new type of social organization. It was by his studies of Marx's analysis of the Commune that Lenin able to recognize so quickly the significance of the Soviets and to establish them as the basis of the new workers' state. Today the advanced American worker needs to know the history of the international struggles of the proletariat. From these he will most quickly learn to understand his own.

Any serious discussion of the prospects for socialism — and, therefore, of the future of mankind — must involve an examination of the October Revolution. This Revolution can be supported or opposed, but it cannot be ignored. The answers one gives to the problems of the present day are inseparably linked to one's assessment of the October Revolution, its aftermath, fate, and legacy. If the October Revolution was doomed to failure; if the Bolshevik seizure of power was, virtually from the start, a fatal enterprise; if Stalinism was the unavoidable outcome of Bolshevism; if the crimes of the Stalinist era flowed from the very concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; and if the final breakdown of the Soviet Union testifies to the bankruptcy of socialist economics, then Marxism, it must be confessed, has suffered a devastating political, intellectual and moral shipwreck. This is, at the present time, the dominant view among university academicians.

If, on the other hand, the October Revolution realistically contained within it other possibilities; if Stalinism was not the outcome of Bolshevism, but its antithesis; and if the rise of Stalinism was, in fact, opposed by Marxists, then the historical situation of revolutionary socialism is very different. The International Committee of the Fourth International upholds the second position, and this necessarily brings us into conflict not only with the outright and unabashed defenders of reaction, but also with the mood of skepticism, demoralization and political renunciation that is commonly found among so many who, at least until recently, considered themselves socialists.

The Internationale is the international song of both Marxist and non-Marxist socialist parties. It was written in French by Eugene Pottier, a wood-worker from Lille, after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, and set to music by P. Degeyter.

The "Internationale" referred to is the International Working Men's Association, the so-called First International (1864­76), part of which had supported the Commune. It has been used across the world as a song of resistence to oppression. Perhaps its most dramatic use in recent years was its repeated singing by the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - although, curiously, the western press did not comment on this.

Hence the systemic violence of Mafia life. Violence, in The Godfather films, is never engaged in for the h e l l of it, or for random kicks; the point is that since the government police and courts will not enforce contracts they deem to be illegal, debts incurred in the Mafia world have to be enforced by violence, by the secular arm. But the violence simply enforces the Mafia equivalent of the law: the codes of honor and loyalty without which the whole enterprise would simply be random and pointless violence. [...]

But of course, what sense does it make to kill people for the hell of it?! I mean, not that it really makes sense to kill people for a purpose, but it is even more crazy to kill people for no particular reason ..